Use of the Lung Flute ECO to assist in sputum collection for tuberculosis testing: a randomised crossover trial

Abstract

Tuberculosis (TB) mainly affects people in resource-limited settings, and in 2022 an estimated 3.1 million of the total 10.6 million people with TB were not diagnosed or linked to treatment for the disease [1]. While multiple non-sputum diagnostics are in development and may help close this gap in care, most TB diagnostic testing is currently still based on sputum, and many people with presumptive TB have difficulties to produce adequate sputum for diagnostic testing [2–4]. In high-resource settings, sputum induction with nebulized hypertonic saline is often routinely used to assist people to produce sputum for diagnostic testing for TB [5]. However, sputum induction is an invasive and resource-intensive technique, and it has not been adopted for routine use in many resource-limited settings. Footnotes This manuscript has recently been accepted for publication in the ERJ Open Research . It is published here in its accepted form prior to copyediting and typesetting by our production team. After these production processes are complete and the authors have approved the resulting proofs, the article will move to the latest issue of the ERJOR online. Please open or download the PDF to view this article. Conflict of interest: All authors have nothing to disclose.